THE STUDENT PRINCESS
Mayer, Milton
The Student Princes By MILTON MAYER Marburg, Germany THE main and simple thing (as Penrod would say) about Germany is this: You can not see it as it is without seeing it as it so recently was....
...And so we find ourselves back, as the student princes get too drunk on too little beer in their Lokal, or tavern meeting-place in the town, howl through the midnight streets, and parade at noon with their swords, their bandages, and their salted scars—we find ourselves back where we were when we crossed the border into Germany and heard the baby scream...
...And, where pictures of Mussolini, in heroic size, still adorn the walls and fences in northern Italy, and no one will ever take the trouble to remove them, you can cover Germany with a magnifying glass and fail to find a memento of 193345...
...a report relieved only by the hope that the breaking patterns outside education would in time affect even the educational system...
...Applause comes from a tavern in Liverpool, and a workman has just broken the all-time record at skittles...
...The eyes and body are protected...
...Absolute domination by his father was accompanied and continued by absolute domination by his teacher...
...His open face is red with honest work, honest joy, and honest pleasure at meeting you...
...and long before German sovereignty was reestablished the American conquerors lost their interest in democratizing and demilitarizing student life...
...McCloy, gave aid and comfort and money, private as well as public, to strengthen the independent students and the independent student associations in the German universities...
...Bandages are worn spectacularly and swords (which would not have been seen five years ago) are carried openly through the streets...
...Christian Democrats, no less, and the bulwark of Christian Democracy's struggle against Communism, just as we were the bulwark of Nazism's struggle against Communism...
...And in the awful need right after the war, the fraternities, when they recovered their houses, could offer a student room and board and (through the Alte Herren) a job, in college and after...
...Now they must make every decision, and they do not know how...
...McCloy, the United States High Commissioner for the Occupation of Germany, and, what is more interesting, Mrs...
...in French Algeria, where colonial slaves, when they get their hands on a coin of the realm, read "Liberte, Egalite, Fra-ternite...
...The visitor is, and must be, mystified...
...Eighty per cent of the German children go to trade school still, and of the 20 per cent who enter Gymnasium, only 10 per cent are graduated...
...The fraternities were rich...
...Things may, indeed, be what they seem, but you can not believe that they are...
...the anti-Nazi minority of the faculty is weaker...
...it does everything to get ahead...
...It is—was, rather, for centuries prior to World War I—one of the most romantic towns in the world...
...They were focusing the incident on the European background...
...At Marburg, the anti-fraternity movement was especially strong, fortified by the Social Democratic govern,-ment of the state of Hesse (Alte Herren are not ordinarily Social Democrats) and by the anti-Nazi rector and faculty (in, at least, a powerful minority) of the university...
...He has done, in his time and in his way, what the Americans are doing now...
...all the more reason (in a land of treasured mementos) why you do not believe what you see or hear...
...There is almost no social life, no real counterpart of our student unions or student commons, and no all-university sports program...
...We look and we listen, but we can not make up our mnds...
...Everywhere in Europe the incident was tremendously publicized...
...It was they and their power that Hitler was bent on destroying, not the fun-loving college boys...
...Germany is full of fine, honest, upstanding liberals who specialized, in their time, in disclosing in Der Neue Leiter their regretful conclusion that civil liberties had to be curtailed in the interest of national security—otherwise there would be no nation left to preserve (or, at any rate, restore) the .liberties...
...is it the chalk-cross of a children's game on the sidewalk, or is it a Swastika...
...The Alte Herren embodied the paternity of National Socialism—the nationalist and racist mystique and the order of Prussianism which divided the Germans into a small class of nobles and officers and a mass of servile, lumpen conscripts...
...German youth today was war-time Nazi childhood...
...As recently as last fall, 300 registered students had to leave Marburg because they could not find rooms...
...it studies to get ahead...
...The German pattern is changing, in a variety of ways and at a variety of levels...
...They antedate the Second and even the First World War...
...The American spirit would, in its own way, beat civilization into these young cannibals (or at least beat the fear of it into them...
...Your first reaction is, "Hurray for the fraternities...
...Dueling was flatly forbidden, and, since rumors persisted that it was going on in dead secret, no student was admitted to examinations if he had a dueling scar...
...The ghost prostrate—or only recumbent—stalks every impression...
...Immediately after 1945 the Americans did what they could to restrain and reduce the fraternities...
...Your second is, "How could a handful of college students resist the Nazi dictatorship...
...Underneath the German this and the German that is the man...
...they, too, are conditioned...
...They read and write and talk-to each other...
...So it is, I suppose, in any country (except Switzerland, where the banks, the hotels, and the tank-traps in the passes testify exactly to what Switzerland is and intends to be...
...The German of 1956 is friendly, helpful, and effusive (as well, of course, as industrious, honest, and efficient...
...This regulation took the heart out of dueling, for the purpose of the duel is the scar, preferably on the cheek...
...Even at Marburg the student princes are a small minority now...
...But, with the German tradition of the all-powerful father, the authoritarianism of the older generation of males, the German Alte Herren are able to enforce the past on their juniors...
...The Tuscaloosa lynch-mob was an anachronism, not a portent...
...officially...
...in Leipzig, and a mother is torn from her bed by the Nazi Sicherkeitsdienst...
...The American fabric was impervious to their jumping up and down on it...
...The male elder has lost face and caste...
...It is only a tummy-ache in Leipzig and skittles in Munich...
...Its bent is crudely materialistic...
...the Nazis are reinstated in the universities (and throughout the educational system...
...A tummy-ache or the Sichet-heitsdienst...
...the goats through some ten years of training and apprenticeship, the sheep through an even longer period of education and interneship or clerkship...
...The duelers from different fraternities are matched, like fighting cocks...
...doctor) and therefore a social menace...
...The Nazi Studentenbund was to take their place...
...In addition, the fraternities were outside the Gleichschal-tung, the bringing-in to-Nazi-line of all previously independent institutions...
...Marburg—the oldest Protestant university in the world—is the real Heidelberg of The Student Prince...
...but in terms of the trend it was meaningless...
...a whole civilization, the Nazi Civilization...
...At the age of 11 or 12, the German child (like, be it said, the French and most other Europeans) is subjected to his first decision, namely, to go to a trade school and be narrowly trained and apprenticed for a single technical job (without any general basic training such as is given in our technical high schools), or to go on to Gymnasium, the classical high school from which he must be graduated to enter the university...
...or he was dismissed from his teaching post in disgrace...
...He is not deceiving you...
...A whole age, the Nazi Age, has been buried...
...All this I know, and can say, because I am of it...
...Fraternity brothers take examinations for one another...
...And then the new rulers, after 1950, told us to forget it all and memorize the rules of democracy, so we immediately forgot it all and memorized the rules of democracy (but we don't argue them in the classroom, because the professor won't let us, any more than he let us, in the Nazi Time, argue the rules of Nazism, or, in the Monarchist Time, argue the rules of monarchy...
...Or is it something to be frightened of, a sign of the Restoration in Germany, the restoration of the bullish, blood-lusting, male-lusting spirit of the old fraternities, whose alumni were uniformly Prussianized enemies of liberalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and of human decency itself...
...America, I knew and I said, and I was able to to say it convincingly, was on its way up from race slavery...
...The Alte Herren want the fraternities to be what they were, intensely secret and exclusive drinking and dueling societies dedicated to the manly arts and the mystique of German virtue watered by German blood...
...They—in present-day Germany—have the jobs to hand out, in public and in private life...
...I was reading the English newspapers and the Austrian periodicals at the time...
...But what of Germany, and the German direction, the German spirit, and the German fabric...
...In Germany, in contrast to their nonsensical counterparts in America, the fraternities thus represented nationalism and militarism: the preoccupations of nobility...
...But we do not talk about the Nazi Time, because the Nazi Time was we ourselves, here in our town, and the new rulers, after 1945, told us to be ashamed of it and ourselves...
...He was away from home too long...
...Until the Cold War warmed up, student dueling was under cover...
...Tremendous pressure, by law, by discrimination, and by intimidation, was put on the fraternities to depreciate and destroy them...
...It is smaller than Heidelberg, far more picturesque, and the university (besides having been better than Heidelberg, which attracted the rich) was, along with Bonn, the favorite school of the nobility...
...It means that Germany has not changed, not in a long time, and will not change in a long time now...
...In Europe, revolutions—and counter-revolutions—begin with student riots and student strikes...
...They are the powerful...
...Barbers and medical students can still be found to salt the wounds—to magnify the scar—and even to make them for students who are afraid to duel...
...But the pattern of educational practice—the theory doesn't matter— is unchanged...
...Even before the bombing of Heidelberg and its tranformation into a permanent American military headquarters, Marburg was the much more romantic of the two places...
...in Munich, and a former teacher has just been egged by a Hitler Youth...
...We're all Democrats now...
...You know it's not like this...
...the student he knows and trusts best says, "It means the failure of reeducation...
...In terms of Nazi democracy they represented an elite to which the Nazi leaders belonged and a conservatism which despised the rabble which the Nazis led and were...
...not the god-man of Hitler or the beast-man of Roosevelt, but the man...
...They are called, here as there, the molders of public opinion...
...the independent students unbelievably poor...
...In wrecked and ruined Germany, the fraternity houses at Marburg compared with the richest houses in America...
...America could and would handle this thing, and was handling it...
...but what is the color of his hands...
...A lucky student had only to join a fraternity and contemplate a future without another decision in front of him...
...or, if he is, he is not deceiving you any more than he is deceiving himself...
...So it is, when you cross the border into Germany today, you do not trust your eyes and ears...
...So it is in America, where the Statue of Liberty bars the way of refugees from oppression...
...Like all continental universities, Marburg has no campus and the students live in rooms in the town, in dreary isolation, and (although things have picked up since 1950) in comparative poverty...
...The mobility of the student body—a student commonly attends two or three universities in as many years, as long as he can pass his final examinations—intensifies the desperate anonymity of the unattached student...
...This the Americans recognized in 1945, and in 1950 forgot...
...they have no influence...
...it joins fraternities to get ahead...
...In 1951 I participated in a glorious effort, in a German university, to get a house for the independent students...
...After the war the rooms in the university towns were filled with expellees, and later with refugees...
...He can avoid the requirement of sudden maturity in one of two ways: by studying dutifully, fearfully, and fearfully hard (as he has been disciplined to do), and emerging an uneducated specialist (like the American physicist or the A.M.A...
...family, and wealth...
...The Alte Herren, like all Alte Herren, live in the past...
...It is, on the surface, an American generation...
...A few, incidentally, resisted to the end...
...Take the revival of the fraternities in the universities and of dueling...
...the explanation, which the authorities could not puncture if they wanted to, is that the Alte Herren require the swords to be carried and displayed for ceremonial purposes...
...refusing, where they could, to let them have their houses back, forbidding dueling, and, in conjunction with anti-Nazi university rectors, forbidding the wearing of colors on the campuses...
...Is the wild and wanton behavior—very masculine behavior, too, restricted to male companionship—of the Marburg college boys a sign of postponed adolescence, or more significant than the escapades of Oxford or Yale undergraduates...
...Everyone now knows where the duels are fought...
...Not more than 350 or 400 fraternity men among 3000 males, and of these 350 or 400, divided amonotwenty-five fraternities, only a third, belonging to the ancient nationalist Burschenschaften, go whole hog...
...The university offers fencing, and the fraternities require it of their members, plus from one to seven duels...
...So it's frightening—all the more so because of the shining armor of unreality everywhere in Germany, the thundering non-existence of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, Prussianism, and Totalitarianism...
...All this is true and unexaggerated...
...They did not, unfortunately, have enough money, public or private, to use for this purpose...
...His German friends tell him, without exception, that the revival of the fraternities and their dueling is dangerous...
...The Alte Herren are uniformly—except in a certain group of fraternities discussed below—reactionaries...
...But in Germany the armor of unreality is so perfectly knit, well-fitted, and so brightly polished that the visitor can not convince himself that he isn't watching Aida...
...The freshman in a German university is, in age and schooling, the sophomore or junior in an American college...
...but it does not have the American roots...
...Hitler destroyed dueling not because he objected to dueling but because he objected to the fraternities themselves, and dueling was one of their reasons for being...
...This last point was, and is, most persuasive...
...the effort failed for want of DM l.-per month (24 cents) which each student would have to contribute for maintenance...
...A child screams in the night in St...
...in England, where a Greek archbishop who refuses to meddle in policies on the side of the Crown is kidnapped in a copy of the Magna Charta...
...or he was condemned after the war, and his wife took a job...
...the members of the Landsmannschaften, the fraternities which originally represented the separate German states, are non-nationalist and generally non-duelers...
...they have had nothing but discipline, and now they must practice self-discipline...
...Each of these two sections of the rising generation, the few sheep and the many goats, goes forward without their members' having to confront another decision until they have to find a job or a wife...
...I was able to focus it instantly on my own, the American...
...We don't talk about the Nazi Time, publicly or privately, officially or unMILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Progressive, is now in Germany as part of a year-long study of conditions in Europe...
...Your second reaction, in the form of a question, is brighter than your first: The fraternities are corporations, owned and operated, houses and all, by the Alte Herren, the alumni...
...The universal military conscription of Bismarck—which America, after beating Prussianism twice, has finally surrendered to itself—was the training-ground for the universal civilian conscription of National Socialism...
...Whole families, at high rentals, took a room which had formerly been rented to a student...
...Certain ministries in Bonn are today dominated by certain fraternities...
...The fraternities had to fight to get their houses back, and the fight, in housing-short Marburg, was bitter...
...A chalk-cross where children have played on the sidewalk in Amsterdam is a Swastika on the sidewalk in Bremen...
...Of course the decision is not his...
...But all these Germans, however more reliable than the visitor himself, are anti-Nazis...
...When the Alte Herren come back to Marburg— or to Heidelberg, Goettingen, or Bonn—for Founders' Day they want to see dueling, and there have been instances, since 1945, where an active chapter of a fraternity has been thrown out bodily for refusing to duel...
...a thoroughly traumatized generation...
...they, too, see the Swastika in the chalk-cross, hear the Sicher-heitsdienst in the baby's scream...
...Professor Bruno Bettel-heim of the University of Chicago, who passed from kindergarten to the doctorate in the German school system of yore, went back to his native land last summer to take a cursory look at education and returned with an extremely depressing report of an absolutely unreformed educational system, stultified and authoritarian still, with democratic "principle" taught by rote but never practiced in the classroom...
...The university students are poor and serious, in general, and in the big-city universities the fraternities are as good as non-existent...
...The wound ends the duel, unless, after the required number of rounds, there is none...
...Professors lecture and they do not know their students, not even by name...
...Let me make myself clearer...
...we're for anybody who's against Hitler...
...But the sheep, when they reach the university, are thrown, for the first time in their lives, on the world, on a cold, lonely, utterly independent world...
...Once that decision was made, the Gymnasium prepared the student for the university and leadership, while the trade school prepared him for technical labor...
...Hitler forbade dueling, and the Americans, in one of their more wholesome imitations of him, continued his policy during the first five years of the Occupation...
...in Russia, where truth is defined in tomorrow's Pravda...
...There might be more of the same, and it might be worse...
...And so the old way is back...
...His reasons were, of course, different from theirs, although, in both cases, the fraternities, represented the caste system—the snobbery which in America belongs almost entirely to wealth, in Germany originally to nobility and only after the turn of the century increasingly to wealth...
...Everywhere Europeans asked me the same thing: Did it mean the beginning of a real revolution against the Supreme Court decision...
...Its bent is not remotely idealistic—a good thing, perhaps, given the waywardness of young German idealism...
...There are, in Germany as in America, the few score thousand who are otherwise...
...My answer—like yours— was No...
...It means that nobody showed these students a better way...
...the most popular Austrian magazine had a two-page spread of pictures, the largest of which showed a white student jumping up and down on the roof of a Negro's car, with the Negro, immobilized, visible at the wheel...
...Hitler, I am sorry to say, was right, though he didn't know it...
...So we don't talk about the Nazi Time...
...They are the nobility (what is left of it) and the rich...
...Louis, Mo., and it's a tummy-ache...
...but in life he is a high school senior...
...and, since Ages and Civilizations do not die overnight, you wonder, wherever you turn and whatever you see or hear, if perhaps this one was buried alive...
...it was always based (although now an exceptionally gifted poor boy or girl squeaks through) on talent (measured, for once and all, at the age of 11 or 12...
...or by joining a fraternity and being a college boy at an age when, in America, he would be a graduate student and through with monkey-shines...
...The Alte Herren rule and run the fraternities...
...infinitely easier to love than the Frenchman, and still more infinitely easier to love than the Englishman...
...Oh, we talk about Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels and Goering and recite all their horrors and debate which of them was the worst and explain (in our new school textbooks, with appalling uniformity) how the failures of the Weimar democracy and the stupidity of democratic leaders abroad brought them to power...
...So we were, because we do what the rulers tell us...
...and the Corps, the fraternities which admitted only the nobility or the very rich (including Jews), neither nationalist nor militarist, represent petty snobbery now (members of some of the Corps must wear neckties in town, must not carry packages, and so on...
...A couple of months ago a mob of white cannibals seized the University of Alabama, terrified the authorities into abdication, and proceeded on a lynching bee which was satisfied, for the moment, short of the rope...
Vol. 20 • June 1956 • No. 6
